On Thursday, at 11:05, David Holland wrote:
| My opinion is that given what Boost is, what it does, and the problems
| to be expected for it, we're better off wiring down its configuration
| as much as possible. It's hard enough trying to figure out wtf is
| going on in the C++ when something fails; wading through to figure out
| what its configuration system did to you as well will only make it
| that much worse.
|
| I already pretty much avoid package failures that involve Boost,
| though, so take this for what it's worth.
Couldn't this be an option of the boost-* packages?
- default (no option): autoconf
- option boost-config: Boost.Config
And maybe write somewhere that pkgsrc does not encourage using the boost-config
option.

That'd be quite dangerous. If you have that option, you are basically
allowing the user to build the libraries with two potentially very
different and conflicting behaviors. These will surely lead to obscure
build failures down the path that are very hard to diagnose.

Also, there would be no way for packages depending on Boost to know what
they are getting nor know what they want to get. For example, how can a
package know that if it gets Boost with autoconf it will work, and it
won't otherwise? It would not be testing for a *feature*, which is what
matters.